Is the luxury industry actually marketplace-ready? Insights from Breuninger’s Dr. Felix Kreyer
When starting out in e-commerce, luxury fashion brands face a first strategic choice: open vs. curated platforms. Speaking on our podcast, Duo Digitale, Dr. Felix Kreyer, CCO at Breuninger, broke down why curated marketplaces are winning over luxury brands and how clean data infrastructure makes or breaks digital expansion.
Key takeaways
- Curated marketplaces let luxury brands control pricing, equity and storytelling, delivering 2.4x higher customer lifetime value and 31% faster gross margin growth than open platforms (Vistoya, 2026).
- The key bottleneck is data readiness: incomplete attributes and poor taxonomy mapping block onboarding on curated platforms, often rooted in heritage craftsmanship and manual workflows.
- Tradebyte accelerates Breuninger onboarding with AI-driven Smart Mapping in TB.One and TB.360 margin insights, ensuring clean data, faster onboarding and profitable, brand-aligned marketplace growth.
Why curation wins in the luxury segment
For a luxury house, joining an open platform can feel like a compromise before the contract is even signed. Mass marketplaces list millions of SKUs, diluting strict brand positioning in the noise and triggering price erosion. Curated marketplaces invert this dynamic. Brands maintain full control over pricing, brand equity and storytelling, while also benefiting from the retailer’s media influence through joint marketing campaigns and editorial features.
While premium environments require higher operational standards, the business case is clear: customers acquired in curated channels demonstrate 2.4x higher lifetime value compared to open platforms, driving 31% faster gross margin growth (Vistoya, 2026).
But platform type is only one piece of the puzzle. Expansion opportunities, brand environment, and existing customer base on the marketplace shape the decision just as much.
As Dr. Felix Kreyer put it: for a premium fashion and lifestyle retailer like Breuninger, the marketplace isn’t built to chase bargain hunters. It’s an assortment extension for customers who already shop there. Through curated brand dropships, Breuninger opens its base of roughly 3 million active shoppers in DACH (Breuninger, 2025) to an extended assortment across fine jewellery, home & living, and ski gear.
For a smaller luxury brand, that’s the actual pitch: you’re not building an audience from zero. You’re plugging into an ecosystem and customer base that already trusts the retailer.
Meet Breuninger’s hospitality strategy
To deliver this level of trust and curation online, leading department stores must bridge digital scale with high-end customer hospitality. Across his appearances on Duo Digitale and at ECD Munich 2026, Felix outlined how Breuninger builds this environment:
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The “Perfect Host”
Breuninger goes the extra mile for its premium and luxury customers. Felix calls it the ‘Perfect Host’ strategy; striving for better omnichannel integration, and promoting the same level of hospitality found in its physical stores, but in an online environment. This includes click-and-collect options, virtual try-on tools and direct digital communication with sales associates. Breuninger also caters for special orders in the luxury segment, such as accommodating requests for hard-to-find shoe sizes.
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Internationalisation & Localisation
Breuninger operates 13 department stores and a marketplace model across Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands. It has a database of around 3 million active premium and luxury customers, and its online shop attracts more than 250 million visits in the DACH region (Breuninger, 2025). Expansion into markets like Austria, the Netherlands, and Poland comes down to three questions – is there market potential, is there whitespace against competitors, and can Breuninger actually fulfill there? Logistics stay centralised out of Germany; shop language, payment methods, and seasonal assortment get localised per market.
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Operational data efficiency
Breuninger analyses target audience demographics, purchasing behaviour and brand environments in order to design collaborative retail media, joint marketing campaigns and product launches. They also ensure that data is handled with the utmost care. Their AI runs on algorithms and agentic workflows, resolving status report errors without manual intervention, translating product descriptions, spotting demand trends and automating retail media optimisations. For a brand plugging into this environment, this is what “marketplace-ready” actually buys: your catalogue gets handled with the same rigour as Breuninger’s own, starting day one.
The operational bottleneck: heritage craftsmanship vs. data readiness
Maintaining this high operational standard is precisely where the friction begins. Felix points directly to the main friction point in luxury onboarding: high-end products built on traditional craftsmanship rarely come with structured, scalable attribute data. Smaller luxury brands and heritage companies built on traditional craftsmanship in particular often lack the scalable, structured data required for successfully expanding on marketplaces. It is not uncommon for there to be no IT team or Data Manager on hand to provide support.
In practice, this means material composition and care details sitting in disconnected spreadsheets, sizing structures shifting by artisan or season, and product copy written once for a single market. On the physical shop floor, an experienced sales associate easily bridges those gaps in conversation. On a curated marketplace, missing attributes block the product export entirely.
A curated marketplace vets every partner before letting them in, and its own reputation is on the line with each brand it lists. Incomplete or inconsistent attribute data isn’t just messy on the brand’s end; it can be the reason a marketplace hesitates to onboard the catalogue at all.
What “data-ready” actually demands
- Rich attributes: full variant data mapping (material composition, sizing, colours) with values aligned to the marketplace’s exact taxonomy. One platform’s “Dark Blue” is another’s “Navy” or “Midnight”; a mismatch means a rejected feed, not just a display issue.
- Strict taxonomy: your internal category structure mapped precisely onto the marketplace’s navigation tree (e.g. Apparel > Tops > Hoodies), fully localised into the target market’s language.
- Visual and content asset hygiene: imagery, titles, and descriptions tailored to the marketplace’s exact specs (pixel dimensions, background requirements, character limits).
- Inventory in sync: inventory, pricing, and order routing tied into continuous sync loops, so availability updates in real time and overselling doesn’t happen.
- PIM & ERP compliance: mandatory fields (EAN/GTIN, fabric composition, size charts) maintained in a structured PIM and fed into ERP. Miss one mandatory field and the whole feed gets rejected.
Clean data drives article-level profitability
Clean data gets a brand onto the platform. Enriched attributes make the articles visible. But connecting to a marketplace is only the starting point. The real question is whether those products are actually profitable to sell there.
That means understanding profitability at the article and channel level, then going deeper: comparing profitability across segments, channels, and markets, then drilling it down to the styles and sizes driving the results. Once your catalogue is uploaded, you need the visibility into the margins behind individual products to actually steer your marketplace business successfully.
It’s a basic that’s easy to skip. As Felix noted on Duo Digitale, brands often write off marketplaces as unprofitable without ever breaking the numbers down by article or size. That can mean walking away from profitable opportunities, or continuing to invest in products that are quietly eroding margins.
“As long as you have a detailed understanding of your contribution margin and its drivers, marketplace can be a very profitable sales channel.” – Dr. Felix Kreyer, CCO at Breuninger
How Tradebyte supports luxury brands from data integration to profit
Tradebyte eliminates the friction between heritage craft and digital scalability. We guide brands through Breuninger’s specific data requirements and streamline the entire integration process.
With Smart Mapping, Tradebyte’s AI-powered engine automatically suggests mandatory marketplace attributes directly within TB.One. AI proposes, and you approve. This reduces manual setup time while keeping full control over data approval with your team. Post-launch, TB.360 provides full visibility into article-level margins, helping brands monitor and improve profitability within their Breuninger partnership.
Ready to scale your catalogue within Breuninger’s curated environment?
Nina Fischer
Editor
Nina Fischer is an experienced content writer at Tradebyte, specialising in fashion and luxury e-commerce, marketplace growth, and social commerce.